And one day, he managed to land an interview for a job as a personal advisor at Danske Bank. They liked him. However, once again the answer was no.  

Dmitriy came up with a desperate offer: he asked for an unpaid internship. Anything to get his foot in the door! The manager called him back a couple of days later and told him no – but instead she offered him a paid summer job for three months.  

Should Dmitriy really quit his job as a retail manager with a company car and the whole shebang in exchange for a three-month summer stint at Danske Bank?  

“It was a hard decision. I faced a significant salary cut and had to say goodbye to my company car,” Dmitriy reveals. But he did it! 

From personal advisor to robot manager 

Before the summer job was over, Danske Bank hired Dmitriy as a full-time personal advisor working with loan applications.  

He liked his job! But as a loan advisor, Dmitriy found he had to perform quite a lot of processes manually. Surely, there was an easier way? On his own initiative, he began working with Excel spreadsheets to save time. 
  
“Whenever I noticed something could be done more easily with Excel, I incorporated it into a spreadsheet. And after some time my Excel sheet was huge!” Dmitriy says. His managers soon started to notice his understanding of automation and clever, time-saving solutions.  

When the bank launched an intelligent automation project to automate processes using virtual robots, Dmitriy was pulled in as an internal consultant with frontline experience. Initially, he worked with the virtual robots alongside his old job as loan advisor.  

“Somehow, I got a taste for programming and developing. I began to learn SAS and Python and Excel in order to develop and maintain local, smaller solutions which were used by the advisors,” he says.  He also spent numerous evenings, when his two children were asleep, obtaining various certificates in automation, SAS, Python and so on.  

The robot project grew until it became impossible for him to be both a loan advisor and work with the robots at the same time. Dmitriy once again took a career leap and is now a full-time ‘master of robots’.   

“I am officially the manager of six robots,” he says with a smile. Even though they only exist virtually, they are registered with an employee number and refer to Dmitriy. They help with daily tasks, such as fetching information from one system to another, or gathering information from many different systems into one report.  

“I don’t know what I want to do in the future, because I’m so happy with this job and what I’m doing. I am helping people, because I am making day-to-day tasks easier for advisors, so they can process their cases more smoothly. I am also helping customers get a much quicker response to their loan applications, he says. “But the good thing about the bank is that there are so many different opportunities. Whatever I develop an interested in, I am sure there will be an opportunity to work with it here.” 

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